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Sexy dragon fun and mystery-solving in Dragon Sleuth Brittany

My interview with a friend of the scalies in Naughty List News #67

Mr. Hands

Feb 6, 2022

This editorial was sponsored by Cherry Blossom Games, makers of Dragon Sleuth Brittany.

Brittany is a dragon girl working as a secretary for a detective agency in the adult point-and-click adventure Dragon Sleuth Brittany. However, she’s not content with her station in life and has much bigger plans for herself.

This week I spoke with VidyaGameMaka, the creator behind the #1 adventure game for scalies. He held nothing back, and we talked about everything from dealing with independent artists to the problems with the App Store.

I’ve edited his answers for length and clarity.

Mr. Hands: Can you explain a bit about what Dragon Sleuth Brittany is about?

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VidyaGameMaka: Even though the titular Brittany starts the game on holiday, she investigates the mysterious disappearances of harpies (flying bird people) that live alongside the dragons in the city.

She later finds out an old acquaintance is taking the harpies to further his evil plot. The kidnapper claims to have found a way to use the harpies to unlock the true potential of dragonkind, turning himself into a towering fire-breathing creature of yore.

It’s now up to Brittany to rescue the harpies he’s kidnapped and stop him from taking over the world!

Mr. Hands: How does sex tie into your game’s story?

VidyaGameMaka: Well, Brittany is a free-spirited dragon girl. She starts the game on a quest to get her breasts enlarged. But of course, Brittany first needs to come up with the money. Even though she lives in the Big City, her job doesn’t bring her a lot of status in dragon society. She’s pretty much a working-class girl.

Brittany is kind of sassy but also a “girly girl.” I wanted to give her a few character flaws to make her more relatable. Nothing is worse to me than a perfect protagonist who can do no wrong.

Dragon society is very different from human society in that nudity, and public sex aren’t generally frowned upon. The dragons believe that consensual sex is an act of nature and interfering with that act is a heinous crime. Brittany doesn’t have to wear her detective outfit, but she likes doing it anyway. However, she doesn’t wear panties, which makes for some interesting upskirt shots throughout the game.

VidyaGameMaka: Many of the conflicts in the game are resolved through sexy minigames. For example, there’s a wrestling minigame that you need to complete to further the plot. But to win, you need to get some more energy. So, of course, you collect milk from a waitress's nipples to get a boost of energy.

We want everybody to be able to enjoy this game. There will be straight sex scenes, gay scenes, and other miscellaneous spicy scenes as well. You can even end the game in a polyamorous relationship, but I won’t say too much about that just yet!

We believe that the act of love is beautiful, and we hope to convey that in our game. Everyone should be able to recognize something of themselves in Brittany. We don’t see things in black-and-white, and we hope you won’t either.

I draw inspiration from some of the greatest furry artists online, and my goal is to hit the major chords of scalie erotica. I want everybody to enjoy Brittany so there won’t be too much gross stuff in the game. If you do not like a scene, we will always provide an exit button for a quick escape.

Mr. Hands: How did you get started with adult games?

VidyaGameMaka: I didn’t start by making adult games right off the bat. I initially wanted to make small games for mobile. Just something easy to throw on the App Store that wouldn’t take years to develop.

An acquaintance of mine showed how he had almost 300 games on the App Store. And although they were not high quality, each of them was pulling in $50 a month on average. Having so many games in the App Store adds up to a nice monthly income.

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VidyaGameMaka: So that’s what I thought would be a good path for me as well: Flood the mobile market with small but engaging games. But, unfortunately, I wasn’t the only one looking for the gold in those hills. The mobile games market was (and is) inundated with games that are just pure garbage that play exactly the same. I didn’t want to be a part of that; I wanted to be known as someone who makes awesome games.

Instead of making a mobile game, I focused on creating a dress-up game for the Newgrounds portal. I hooked up with an artist who did all of the outfits and animations. Everything he made for the game looked great, but it took him a year to finish the art. Unfortunately, the game went largely ignored after it was released. That’s when I realized that making games for a general audience would be extremely difficult.

Mr. Hands: You focus mainly on the programming of your games. Was it challenging to find artists to collaborate with?

VidyaGameMaka: You could say that finding the right people to work with is an adventure on its own!

I like working with artists, but it's much harder to find people who stick with you when you’re doing game development part-time alongside your regular job. All of the money I have left after my living expenses goes into my game development. And most of that goes into art commissions.

I realized that the way I was doing business on the dress-up game wasn’t working out in the long run. So I now take a different approach by having people sign up-front agreements about the work they’re committing to. These agreements let me be specific about what I desire from my artists.

On the artist’s side, a contract like that means they can set their own due dates and how much they charge me for the work. Setting these expectations from the start removes a lot of stress from both parties.

I’ve now teamed up with a new artist, who’s been through thick and thin with me. He’s been with me for three years and does amazing pixel art. He works with his girlfriend, who handles the high-resolution artwork while he works on the animations. They’re both really understanding about the part-time aspect too.

Mr. Hands: Why did you decide to make Dragon Sleuth Brittany a sexy point-and-click adventure?

VidyaGameMaka: At first, I thought I wanted to make a sexy platformer with Unity. But even though I found a really good character controller, it was challenging to get the right game feel.

So I took a step back to figure out what I wanted to make instead. I researched a bunch of adult RPG Maker games to figure out what people liked about them. Mostly, these games seemed to be about clicking around, moving your character, and talking to people. There was usually a mountain of dialog to get through to finally be rewarded with a single saucy picture. Only a few of the games I tried had animated sex scenes.

Most of these games also used the same turn-based combat. It got to the point where I would immediately use cheats to get myself through the combat just to escape the grind. Suffice to say that I didn’t like the combat in these games very much.

But what I did like was being able to move around and interact with people in a fantasy world. So I decided to focus on these mechanics but replace the combat with original but straightforward minigames.

Mr. Hands: Why did you decide to focus your games on “scalies” (fans of anthropomorphized lizards), a niche within the furry community?

VidyaGameMaka: I like the furry community a lot, but I wanted to do something truly unique that the fans of scalies could enjoy. Scalies are still an underserved community, even if they are growing steadily in numbers.

I believe that high-quality content made for scalies can also appeal to furries. Our dragons don’t have wings, but they do have a tail and a human-like body and face. Despite their animalistic appearance, deep down they’re people that come in a rainbow of colors.

We removed the wings from our dragons because they are too hard to deal with when animating. They take up way too much screen real estate even when standing still. But wings are difficult to deal with when you’re making a sex scene. As a director, it’s hard enough as it is to make sure the pose looks good and everyone’s genitals are framed in the shot. Wings add so much complexity to the framing that we didn’t think it fit our game.

Mr. Hands: What can people do to support your game?

The best thing you can do for us right now is to download our game from Itch.io. You can also support us on both Patreon and SubscribeStar.

With your help, we can make the best sexy point-and-click adventure possible!